Complicity depends on knowledge. Legal complicity requires knowing that one is helping commit a crime. Moral complicity can be lower, allowing passive involvement. Knowledge can be inferred from what someone sees, hears, or understands, even when a person tries to ignore it. A person may cope by closing their eyes, shutting down thoughts, or turning away, telling themselves someone else will act and that they are not responsible. Over time, it can become easier to live with what is known by not admitting it even to oneself. Lesley Groff, a longtime executive assistant to Jeffrey Epstein, has claimed she knew nothing of his crimes. She met a headhunter who described a job to organize one man’s life, and she said she had never heard of Epstein before the interview. She later described her career path from college to office work, retail sales, and events planning, leading to an assistant role arranged through a jobs listing site.
"Complicity requires knowledge. To be legally complicit in a crime, you have to know you are helping to commit it. To be morally complicit, the bar is lower. You don't even have to play an active part. To have knowledge of the crime and do nothing is enough. But how do we know what someone knows? I think of all the times I've closed my eyes or shut down a thought or turned away from something wrong, large or small, a planet-level ecological harm or a sub-fiver theft in the supermarket right in front of me."
"Surely, I say to myself, someone else will do something. It's not my fault or my responsibility; I am too inconsequential to make a difference here. Somewhere in the course of those thoughts, I decide not to let the knowledge of what I've seen or heard or inferred take up residence in my mind. In this way, over time, I've found that it is much easier to live with what I know if I do not admit what I know even to myself."
"Groff met with a headhunter, and he told her that there was a job to organize one man's life. This man was EPSTEIN, a Manhattan socialite. GROFF had never heard of EPSTEIN before this. Lesley Groff never planned to be an assistant. After college at the University of Texas in Dallas, she moved to New Jersey with her first husband, worked for an office supplies company for nine years, divorced, worked as a salesperson at the department store Nordstrom, met her second husband at a triathlon and then decided she wanted to try to find work as an events planner on Wall Street."
"In 2001, a headhunter found her resume on Monster, a jobs listing site, and set up Groff, then in her mid-30s, with an interview to be an assistant to a wealthy financier. For the interview, Groff went to Epstein's offices on the 4th floor of 457"
Read at www.theguardian.com
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